Contacts App Redesign

MOBILE / ANDROID / iOS

PRODUCT DESIGNER

Good Technology

Abstract

The goal of the new contacts design was part of a greater effort to redesign and rethink the user workflow in the Good for Enterprise App and create an experience that allows users to be more productive using native solutions. The design team worked to create a design framework that would be based on native behaviors with added enterprise features.

Areas of Focus

From the research I conducted, I broke down the feature to these key user environments:

  • Smart Contacts
  • Information Design
  • Contextual Contact Search
  • User Presence

Outcomes

This experience led to the sales staff advocating for more in-person user research with their customers as they presented the impact of my work in C-level meetings. This allowed me to help foster a user-centered culture within the company.

ROLE & OBJECTIVES

NATIVE SOLUTIONS LACK ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONALITY - CREATING "BURDENS" FOR THE END USER

  • Searching for contacts from a large set is an unmanageable task
  • Tracking who is important at different stages of a user's workflow
  • Assessing information hierarchy - what types of details are needed for different use cases and retaining purposes?
  • Relating a user's end goal to a contact
  • Deliver a time-based solution that is reactive, dynamic and useufl

User Analysis / Pain Points

To prepare for the storyboarding process and validate our assumptions, we engaged with 10 internal users and 8 external customers in Q&A sessions to gain a better understanding of user goals, requirements, and "pain points" regarding contact management. From these I began to analyize my assumptions and focus on usability issues.

Based on the feedback, user preferences and tendencies heavily drive their contact management task flows

  • Manual entry of new contacts is time consuming. First-time exchange of contact information is done "on-the-fly" with business cards and manually entered later. To save time, only important contacts are entered. Users would benefit from a feature that automatically added contacts.
  • Users have more contacts than they actually deal with on a normal basis. The app would need a weighting feature to make frequent contacts more accessible.
  • Users depended on photos, jotted down notes, and contextual info to remember a contact.
  • Users have a mix of personal and work contacts, would like to see more differentiation or filter options.

Assumption Analysis

  • Free/Busy, time zones, and availability information is essential for users to determine the timing and method of communication.
  • In the A-B testing session, users did not see the benefit in seeing recommended communication actions, and asked if they could override them.
  • In an abstract design session, I presented the idea of showing a user's specific details of travel, meeting details, geo-location, and in-transit info. Users preferred the Outlook mehods of showing availability and worried about security and privacy when displaying location details.
  • "VIP" and "Favorite" has different meanings, more granularity in differentiating the two would be helpful
  • Users responded positively to contact-specific or group-specific notifications and rules
  • Users responded well to seeing a history of exchanges to see overall and recenty activity with a contact. This eliminates the need to go through their email or call history. Contact history gives a user better context and helps to build the relationships over time.
  • Users only manually entered important contacts and saved the rest in other repositories (ie. business cards). Sales users admitted to saving business cards that were years old in shoe boxes and refused to discard them in case of any need of them in the future.

Takeaways

  • Users disapproved the "silo" nature of contact management. They wanted more integration with other tools or services.
  • A one-click solution to adding contacts would be valuable
  • Mutual contact information is powerful in building relationships
  • Users use contextual info (ie. emails, meetings, meta data, memory) to find contacts
  • Users use photo, company, job title, and location to differntiate between identical names
  • For less-active contacts, users did not want contacts to ever be deleted, but rather archived or stripped of importance in the UI. This is synonymous with users never discarding old business cards.
  • Users need currently relevant contacts to be more visible.
  • Users will resort to alternative methods to get in touch with someone or find someone's contact (ie. reaching out to their boss, calling directly, sending email, looking up past emails or exchanges, etc). The app would need to include contact history and also an organization chart.

SMART CONTACTS

A. FREQUENCY & RECENCY

  • Automatically prioritzed frequently and recently contacted or viewed contacts
  • This feature came from observing users referring to 'Recent Calls' as the most common feature they used in their native contact app.

INFORMATION DESIGN

B. Internal Business Contact

According to the card sorting exercise, the most important information needed to easily view a contact list is (in order of priority):

  • User Photo
  • First and Last Name
  • Job Title
  • Business Email Address

C. Personal Contact

For personal contact, usually the only information available is the phone number. In this example, the area code is useful information for the user to easily recognize.

D. External Business Contact

This example is a hybrid of the first two, using the email address and the phone number as identifiers.

CONTEXTUAL CONTACT SEARCH

User Goals & Task Flows

When searching for a contact, the user relies on contextual information to find the correct contact. Because the search feature searches both the user's personal contact list and the company distribution list, it is essential to include historical and contextual functionality while searching from a large repository.

Screen Analysis & Info Design

In the first screen, it shows recent search queries before the user types anything. This makes it easy for the user to view recent or frequent searches without needing to retype or remember what they previously typed.

In the second screen, the user has entered a search query and the search results UI is laid out similar to the default contact list, but with additional information. Users mentioned that when doing a look-up, office location was an important differentiator and also helped to navigate them enroute to meetings. This UI is helpful as the user has enough information to make their decision and does not need to navigate into contact details to find location and GPS information.

USER PRESENCE

User Goals & Task Flows

At this point of the interaction, the user needs to find additional information they didn't have in previous screens. This includes availability, Out of Office or Presence Message, time zone information, work meta data, additional contact numbers or emails, and notes.

Screen Analysis & Info Design

The biggest benefit for enterprise users with this screen is the presence and availability information under the photo. Often times, the busy presence icon is not enough and not all users leave a Presence message. The "New York 3:30 PM EST" gives the user context of what part of the work day the contact is in. The "Free at 2:30 PST" is helpful as the user can easily understand their schedule without having to do any mental calculations.